Field of the Invention
This invention provides an event analysis system. Specifically, this invention provides an event analysis system that uses encryption to protect the privacy of event data.
Related Art
In today's economy, information about consumers or users is recognized as a primary and personal asset. Information data is an important asset not only for corporations and individuals and the privacy of such data is often essential. In many instances, the need to actively protect the privacy of an individual's data is essential to maintaining an electronic relationship with merchants and service providers.
The collection of personal information is, however, not allowed in many countries without the consent or approval of the corresponding individual. The data are considered to be personalized data if it is possible to determine the individual to which the data is related from the detected data. As a consequence, personalized data can often not be used for determining certain habits of a large amount of people as it is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain the consent of all the individuals involved. From an economical point of view, it is desirable to obtain further details of personal habits or consumer habits by analyzing streams of people. For example, many people carry mobile phones and each mobile phone emits a unique identifier that allows data systems to uniquely identify the mobile phone, e.g. the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (“IMSI”). This data can be uniquely associated with an individual with certainty. In many countries it is currently against the law to generate location-based profiles based on data emitted by mobile phones. Vehicle tracking information such as license plate numbers can also be directly associated with an individual the collection of such personalized data may not be allowed in many jurisdictions by commercial parties and individuals.
One possibility to anonymize personalized data would be the use of encryption techniques. The owner of the encryption method is normally able to decrypt the encrypted data so that the owner of the encryption technology can determine which individual is associated with an encrypted personal identifier. Thus, a need exists for an encryption event data management system that ensures the privacy of personal information and data thus allowing for the collection and storage of such data for current or later analysis.
Accordingly, a need exists to provide a possibility to collect personalized data while ensuring that the individual to which the personalized data relate cannot be identified.